I've been getting a lot of requests for information surrounding the iPhone 4-based video rig I use to record my videos for AllThingsD.com and The Wall Street Journal. Obey the "best camera" principal - that the best camera is the one you have with you - and check it out. Read more – ‘My Ultimate iPhone 4 Video Recording Rig’.
Last week I was a guest on a panel at Mashable's NextUP NYC event for social media week, New York. We talked about the skills required for modern journalists, and how outlets for journalism and other media continue to evolve.
It's all in the videos. Read more – ‘Mashable NextUP NYC: Emerging Skills of Tomorrow’s Journalist’.
I'll be on a panel Tuesday, Feb. 8th at 6:30pm (EST) talking about what journalists need to know today and tomorrow to remain useful, relevant and employed.
I'd bet we'll also talk about media companies and people doing things right, and how to train for whats next.
I'll be joining Jay Rosen of NYU, Vadim Lavrusik of Mashable, Jenna Wortham of the NYT tech section and Laurie Segall, a reporter at CNN. A pretty decent cast of characters for this subject, actually.
Why should you believe us? I'm not certain you should, but here are the perspectives you will get: Read more – ‘What’s Next for Journalists? Hear Me Guess @ NextUp NYC’.
I was just congratulated on having made a real change to the way wikipedia works across the entire world. Now, or, rather, a week from now, all wikipedia editors will be able to use an RSS feed of their edits, to share them with the world. Read more – ‘Playing With Live Ammo-I Just Added a Feature to Wikipedia’.
Yesterday my cousin Jordan asked for a little advice about computer purchase. Laptop vs. desktop, Mac vs. PC, and what are all these netbook things? For background, she was looking for something for her husband, who is in his late twenties or early thirties, active and business-minded, though not “techie.” Below is the email I [...] Read more – ‘If I Were Buying a Computer Today…’.
The following tutorial was designed as part of the curriculum for Stanford University's Comm 217: Digital Journalism class. It has been pared doen to only the necessary steps.
It only covers installing WordPress.org (the self-hosted, single user WordPress variant) on a Cpanel-based hosting platform. In this case, we are using Hostmonster.com.
In later tutorials, we will be covering basic web-development tools and WordPress administration, such as theme, widget and plugin selection. Read more – ‘Installing WordPress.org in 10 slides and 8 minutes’.
Now that you’ve posted your first messages to twitter, and made use of best practices from the Twitter 101 Cheat Sheet, take your tweeting to the next level by learning some twitter specific language, adding multimedia to your tweets and beginning to engage with twitter, rather than publish to it. To take this next step, [...] Read more – ‘Twitter 201 for Journalists- Twitter Etiquette, or Joining the Cocktail Party’.
Several years ago, I was a foreigner in a strange land on Thanksgiving day. Every Thanksgiving since, I've thought back to how my wonderful friends there welcomed me and my traditions into their lives. I've written a the short tale below to try and share the feelings about this day that I was blessed with thanks to the generosity of my foreign hosts. Read more – ‘The Truths We Find Self Evident- A Thanksgiving Day Message for Those I Love’.
I got a quick tour of recently opened Pizza Paisan in Berkeley, including some time to chat with their master pizziola (pizza chef) recently emigrated from Italy.
They do classic Italian style crust and baking (brick oven and all) but fold in some of the fresh, local ingredients that have made the Berkeley food scene so famous. Read more – ‘Pizza Paisan in Berkeley, CA (video)’.
My screens are shaped like this But I’d like my mouse to behave as though they are shaped like this. Though, only at the very edge of the screen. Anyone with me? Read more – ‘I Hate the Crusts.’.
I went about my normal wake-up routine this morning of drowsily perusing twitter while in bed, on my back, with my iPhone myopically close to my face.
I clicked a link from my friend @lheron that promised tos end me to one of those awesome interactives put together by the various teams at The New York Times. Read more – ‘The election will be tweeted- My surprise byline in The New York Times’.
Didn't know what it was back then, but I shot a quick video of one of Google's autonomous Prius (Prii?) before it drove away from in front of Joya in Downtown Palo Alto. Read more – ‘Google’s Autonomous Prius in 2009’.
Twitter for iPhone 101 Turn your device sideways if it helps you see the images. Next, go to my ‘Twitter 101 for Journalists’ Cheat Sheet Then, take it to the next level. Wan’t to post a picture, share a link, add your location or look up recent #hashtags you’ve used? It’s all easy. Click the [...] Read more – ‘Twitter for iPhone 101 – In 5 Minutes’.
Tweeting Guidelines 1. Confirm you are tweeting from the correct account. 2. Keep it to < 120 characters 3. Get others’ @usernames to mention in tweets. Ask for their “twitter name” or “twitter handle.” 4. Lead with the important info. 5. Finish with only one correct #hashtag 6. When tweeting from a shared account, finish [...] Read more – ‘Twitter 101 for Journalists- Cheat Sheet’.
A few weeks back, The Newy York Times City room blog decided to give the crowd-sourcing business a try and build a photo montage of the NYC waterfront. New York has a working waterfront, and lots of it. Manhattan, after all, is an island. I went out to Brooklyn Bridge Park around dusk and looked [...] Read more – ‘Waterfront Covered. My Images from the NYT Crowd-Sourcing Project.’.
The weekend of July 31, The New York Times' City Room blog is asking you to help them cover New York's waterfront, in a crowd-sourced storytelling adventure.
Below you'll find all the info needed to submit some images and descriptions. Some of the best will be featured at nytimes.com and likley in the print edition of the paper.
They don't have a post with instructions about it up yet, so I've pasted most of the email sent out about the project here so everyone can join in the fun. Read more – ‘Covering the Waterfront: Shoot Photos for The New York Times’.
Planned, shot, edited and filed all from the iPhone 4- this is my report from the gulf coast early in the week most experts predict the oil from the BP spill will begin to come ashore.
I'm currently on a road trip on my way to become an intern at The New York Times somewhere between the tech reporting and social media desks. Predictably, I picked up a new iPhone 4 on release day, with the hopes that the new camera and editing tools would make it a formidable news gathering device.
While my comrades and I didn't see any oil on the beaches yet, we came across some very interesting preparations underway by the local population, as well as plenty of orange BP sponsored oil protection booms. Read more – ‘Video: News From The Gulf- Planned, Shot, Edited and Filed from the iPhone 4’.
Facebook is beta testing a product in the same space that so many giants have attacked and fallen short. The curated question-answer service has stumped the biggest of bigs. Has it been about social scale all along? Read more – ‘Facebook Moving to Answer the Quora Question’.
Lick Observatory has been doing science since the late 1880s, when the first telescope was installed there. These photos were part of research for a forthcoming article. UC Lick Observatory Read more – ‘On The Mount: A Photo Tour of Lick Observatory’.
This past weekend, a little crowd of journalists, app developers and designers got together under the watchful eye of one Burt Herman to engage in an act of positive rebellion. They were there to wake up the old grey lady, drag her out of her bed, and teach her to dance like lady Gaga instead of like Grace Kelley. Read more – ‘Hacks and Hackers Unite: Developing an iPad app for The New York Times Lens Blog’.
It’s a lovley song by a classmate of mine and a member of the Bluegrass band Nimbleweed. The Idealized Science Diitty Read more – ‘Idealized Science Ditty’.
My Digital Media Entrepreneurship group from used a Stanford d.school technique to brainstorm 100 possible names for our product, organize them by theme and then cut them down to the final four, all in under 10 minutes. Here are two quick photos of the process Read more – ‘Quickie Photos of Prototyping for Branding’.
We all need to find insights about how to make our projects more relevant to users, but have only a finite amount of time to gather user data. If we were bigger and funded, we could to focus groups and A/B testing out the wazoo. Instead, I suggest you take a page from the Stanford design school (d.school) playbook. Read more – ‘People Are Slow: How to Get User Insights and Innovate Quickly’.
This is a short sampling of some of my video work. All videos here were produced for D:AllThingsDigital, and featured both there at at WSJ.com. In all cases the writing, production and editing are my work. In cases where I’m in front of the camera and it’s following me, I had some videographer help. Hey, [...] Read more – ‘Video Portfolio’.
I’ll periodically be live streaming from in front of the University Avenue Apple store in Palo Alto, CA. I’m covering the fanboy mayhem for AllThingsD, but I figured we could have a little live video too. I’m tweeting the action from @withdrake. Scoble is here, Ben Parr stopped by, and as soon as my intrepid [...] Read more – ‘Live from the Palo Alto Apple Store— Its an iPad Campout!’.
How I converted a standard Timbuk2 backpack into an iPhone-charging, laptop-toting, enviro-hipster envy making, solar power machine. Plus all the instructions for you to make your own. Read more – ‘Solar Powered Backpack— The Solar Timbuk2 Mk.2’.
ice folks at the MOTO development group have released this video detailing the performance characteristics of various touch screens on the market. It gets ugly for the Droid.
This is just one performance test, but frustration runs high when you touch it here and it opens something there. Click through to see the video. Read more – ‘You Touch it WHERE? Smartphone Touch Screens Compared by Actual Robot’.
In late 2009, San Francisco Chronicle Staff writer and fellow Stanford grad student Kathryn Roethel and I followed the Coughlin family through several weeks of treatment and preparation leading up to Little Chase's Make-a-Wish trip to Disneyland. Read more – ‘Matters of the Heart Photo Essay’.
Early last week, Stanford's graduate journalism Students used phones, email, text messages and twitter to reenact the earliest moments of reporting after the recent catastrophic earthquake in Chile. Did they do irreparable harm to the information landscape? To those who lost loved ones in the actual quake? To the reputations of their own brands? Read more – ‘Please DONT Retweet! A Tale of Learning by Failure’.
The Nutshell: You head over to chatroulette.com, hit start, and your webcam and microphone are activated. You are immediately connected to another live human being, selected at random from the users online at the time. If a person doesn't look interesting for whatever reason, you just hit next and you are shuffled over to the next random person. Sounds Harmless, right? Read more – ‘Chatroulette- Freebasing the Social Web’.
E-Mag designers are paid by magazine companies, not readers. It shows.
No one seems to remember the quiet, indelible, human truths that have driven magazine consumption for a hundred years. It's not too late. Read more – ‘Beautiful E-Mags Miss the Point’.
If you are interested in how the the news is presented and why its broken, I say this. Watch this, laugh, ponder, foment rebellion, repeat. Read more – ‘Rethink the NEWs.’.
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, email, digg, delicious..... Today the personal sharing options are endless. Using enough of thes services in concert most certainly connects you with more people than many "broadcasters" who have to be licensed by the FCC. That is it say, its powerful stuff. Read more – ‘Digital Journalism: The Project Proposal’.
I know we don't need another CES postmortem, so I'll keep this short.
I've grabbed some images and statistics that give a sense of CES' modern largesse as compared to twenty years ago. Read more – ‘CES’ Huge Growth Depicted—That’s What She Said’.
For Redwood City parents coping with 5-year-old’s chronic disease, normal life is the greatest gift.
My colleague Kathryn Roethel produced an amazing magazine length story that I was lucky enough to photograph. Please read this amazing story of a remarkable little boy. Read more – ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?’.
Today's NewTeeVee Live conference at S.F.'s Mission Bay Center is aimed at foretelling, and maybe saving, the future of TV. Read more – ‘Live Blog: NewTeeVeeLive’.
Canadian geese have come to dominate the lawns of the city’s beloved Memorial Park. In their Thursday, Oct. 1 meeting, the Cupertino Parks and Recreation Commission took up the unusual problem and discussed goose abatement strategies.
Read more – ‘Who They Gonna Call?’.
A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A video visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Chris Wetherell and his creation, Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader.
Read more – ‘First Column at AllThingsDigital’.
Reinventing the retirement experience for the rebellious baby boomer. A project deliverable for Stanford's design boot camp. Read more – ‘Design Boot Camp’.
The NYT Doesn't Cost a Dime Anymore. I Don't Know Why We Expect it to Turn on One.
In front of an audience of roughly 100, some of whom appeared to have arrived from the myriad alumni events happening on campus this homecoming weekend, Professor and Pulitzer winner Joel Brinkley moderated a combo lecture and discussion between some of Journalism's giants-left-standing. Read more – ‘44th Annual Carlos Kelly McClatchy Memorial Symposium’.
This is a test of Apture. If I were to write about Ghana, this is what Apture can do. I can also look at Stanford. And Miran Pavic. If I were to add a link to Make-a-Wish, it would be here. Damn. Read more – ‘Testing Apture- The Ghana Edition’.
This week we covered the basics of audio recording equipment and then delved into Wordpress Extend and Firefox developer tools.
Read more – ‘Stanford BlogLuck 2.0’.
On Sunday the 20th, the Graduate Program in Journalism Cohort at Stanford held the first installment of our "BlogLuck". The goal of the program is to leverage the various expertises in the group into informative lessons and conversations to share amongst the group. Read more – ‘Stanford BlogLuck ver1.- Teaching Tech’.
Background: In 2004, I was starting work at a radio station and playing the harmonica a lot. I would carry my harp case and practice amp to friends’ houses and jams various places. The gear setup wasnt bad, but I thought it could be better. the Jamcase was my first more involved build. It entailed [...] Read more – ‘Hardware Projects: Jamcase’.
So I’m almost finished with a fun little project to turn my SF style bike helmet into something a little more useful thanks to some clever tail light integration. That post will be up in the “Projects” page in the next day or two. However, while photographing the light I’m using, something very strange happened. [...] Read more – ‘Case of the Haunted Bike Light’.
All of these communications technologies: Twitter, Google Voice, skype, Flickr, etc are, lets face it and call a duck a duck, just data handling and interface engines. It’s all streams of digital information, that is, ones and zeros at the most basic level.
We are witnessing the slow death of telephony. Read more – ‘How do YOU use it? Data Stream of Consciousness’.
This week I officially started my employ as intern at allthingsD, WSJ affiliated tech sector news site. I attended my first staff meeting at their headquarters in the Noe Valley in SF, and hopped right in the saddle to write my first “Weekend Update”. Its a weekly wrap-up of some highlights from the previous week [...] Read more – ‘My First allthingsD Assignment- now online!’.
Hi Guys, I recently reupped my all access pass for the first time in about a year. I had just created a video and the combo of you $3-$25 pricing strategy and the quality of the new video effects sealed the deal for me. My only concern is that like MOST purchasers, I may have [...] Read more – ‘An Open letter to Animoto’.
Day 1- The Team Arrives Day 2- Braille Santa Barbara to Pepperdine Day 3-Pepperdine to UC Irvine Final Stage- UCI to Braille Institute San Diego Read more – ‘Cycling for Sight 2009- Photos’.
Below are a few audio pieces I put together surrounding the Cycling for Sight 2009 ride. [podcast]http://www.withdrake.com/newsite/wp-content/Podcasts/CFSGenesisStory.mp3[/podcast] The Genesis Story This is the genesis story of the ride, featuring ride co-founders Dave, Johnathan and Andy. They talk adventure cycling, crazy ideas and the line between genius and insanity. Give a listen. Its about 10mins. long. [...] Read more – ‘Cycling for Sight- Audio’.
The following is an excerpt from a June 18th issue of the NYT online edition. I posed a question about growth of visual media in the online environment and the role of it’s producers. Assistant Managing editor Michele McNally had this to say. Talk to the Newsroom: Assistant Managing Editor Michele McNally The Changing Role [...] Read more – ‘The Changing Role of the Photographer’.
Here is a little video mashup from my ride aboard the vomit comet. You can see more pics HERE, but please enjoy the video. I’ve addd a little video from inside the NBL (Neutral Buoyancy Lab) where I did my physiological training VIDEO. Its also where they have the 6.5 million gallon pool with the [...] Read more – ‘Video from the Vomit Comet’.
My hop finally came today after reporting to Ellington Airfeild at 7am. I was suited up, attached to my electrodes and sat down for a solid half hour of three seperate breifings (think pre-flight safety briefing on a commercial aircraft but in an acrobatic jumbo jet). The Vomit Comet du jour was a 727 operated [...] Read more – ‘NASA 0 G Flight- The most terrible experience I ever loved.’.
The first NASA photos are up. Have a look. I’ll be writing a little story/recap about my NASA zero G experience probably from my flight out tomorrow. it feels about 500% more awesome than the pictures look. Also, look for some cool videos soon. Read more – ‘First NASA Photos’.
Greetings to all the return viewers, as well as first timers. The link below will take you to a very special video unlike anything we’ve produced so far. Its a combination of photos and sounds that gets to the heart of why CFS is so very special. Please come back to withdrake.com in the coming [...] Read more – ‘Cycling for Sight- Soundslides’.
Just the beginning. Come back tomorrow night for lots more multi-media from the ride. Greetings again all. We gathered so much great multi-media material over the last couple days that its still being processed, chewed on, sorted and arrangted for your consuming pleasure. I plan on spending my day tomorrow finalizing some awesome features that [...] Read more – ‘Cycling for Sight- The Last Day’.
Today our car route took us a little away from our bikers, so the media crew decided to roll out something we’ve been thinking about all along. There are a few pictures below, but the highlight of the post tonight is a very special kind of slide show. Throw on some headphones and hit the [...] Read more – ‘Cycling for Sight- Pepperdine to UC Irvine’.
Check out today’s photos! We had a great ride from UC Santa Barbara to Pepperdine U, on our way to raising $75,000 for the Braille Institutes. A photo montage is below, or feel free to check out the gallery below that. Cycling for Sight 2009- Ride Day 1 from E. Drake Martinet on Vimeo. Read more – ‘Cycling for Sight- Day 2 the RIDE’.
Just a few photos from day one of the ride. High spirits and fresh legs all around. CFS09 has almost met their goal of $75,000, and you can log on to donate. Just click the banner at the bottom of the photo gallery for details. Read more – ‘Cycling for Sight 2009- First Look Photos’.
Beginning tomorrow, withdrake.com will be home to all the latest updates from the 2009 San Deigo Braille Institute “Cycling for Sight” Ride. Dozens of both sighted and vidualy impaired riders will be braving the byways between Santa Barbara and San Diego in a three day race for funds, awareness and community. I’ll be documenting the [...] Read more – ‘Get your Updates- Cycling for Sight!’.
The photography section of the site has finally been fleshed out. Have a look, tell em what you think, leave your comments. Just head over to “Photofolio” in the “projects” section. Read more – ‘Photos are up!’.
Here are a few videos from my 2008 Sustainable Peoples project. Sustainable Peoples Webisode 1- You Already Changed the World. from E. Drake Martinet on Vimeo. Sustainable Peoples Webisode 2- Faith, Medecine and a New Way Forward from E. Drake Martinet on Vimeo. Sustainable Peoples Webisode 3- Micro Agriculture and a Lifetime of Activism from [...] Read more – ‘Sustainable Peoples Webisodes- Now on Vimeo’.
My 8 year old self is shooting temporally displaced spit wads at the back of my 25 year old head today. Jealousy, thy name is NASA. These are some iphone shots from this mornings briefing at NASA Ames. I guess this is post is the first of many about my experience as a test subject [...] Read more – ‘Jealous?… You are if you’re 8.’.
